It takes a fair bit of engery and time to run any choir...nobody would disagree I hope!
Sometimes it's important to take stock and look at goals for growth and what tasks can be shared with others. For me, with 3 choirs and a more than full time day job I have needed to seriously look at this as time is so precious.
2017 is going to be a musically exiting year for all choirs. Our adult choir continues to grow from the less than 20 people when I started to over 50 now. The Major Minors Children's Choir has now grown it's own extension choir The Harmonic Minors which is auditioned and we continue to develop more contacts and opporutnities to perform.
For me as pianist, social marketing manager, flyer/promotion designer and website manager for the Major Minors it's time to take a step back- not an easy decision to make.
We are going to set up a role for social marketing for the adult choir which will free me up somewhat, and call on the services of another pianist to help prepare the technically more difficult pieces that for m,e take more time. This means a lot of the classical repertoire will no longer need to be mine to work on at home. The pop, jazz, broadway etc remains my genre. So we will see how that goes.
I have been making the most of the Christmas summer holidays and have got as far out as designing flyers for concerts as far into the year as November so when the scores arrive most of the groundwork for those events is done and we're ready to go.
We have also been experimenting with online ticket sales for a social.fundraising event with the choirs to see Sing the movie.
It took some finding but I located a site that if you choose to not use credit card payments there are no other fees. I'm impressed wiht this ticketing site eventsmart.com. What we have noticed however is that many of our choir are a little timid with internet and internet banking so it will be interesting to see how it goes when everyone returns from their holidays. The condition of the movie event hire was that we managed the ticketing, the margins aren't high...fair enough. Anyway here's the event site....https://majorminors.eventsmart.com/events/singthemoviefundraiser/ and so far it is doing everthing I wanted it to do. Confirms registrations, allocates a reference number, automatically emails the person who registered and once paid for and confirmed by me a receipt is triggered. It also has the ability to do paypal payments etc with a small commission and handles a huge number of currencies (including little New Zealand!). Not a bad find at all I'd say and if you are familiar with Wordpress you'll find the set up super easy.
Karen
